2018 Excellence Awards

February 12, 2019

2018 – Award #II

The 3GPP Excellence Award, for work in 2018, has been presented to Gilles Téniou in recognition of his contribution to the SA4 Working Group’s output for Virtual Reality Profiles for Streaming Media (VRStream).

3GPP SA4 Chair Frederic Gabin and fellow Vice-Chair Nikolai Leung made the Award to Gilles at their recent meeting in Bruges.

TV and radio services over 3GPP systems

January 11, 2019

Production, contribution and distribution of TV and radio services over 3GPP systems - By Roland Beutler, EBU/SWR (Rapporteur 3GPP FS_AVPROD)

Broadcasting companies have looked to deliver all their services, linear and nonlinear, to portable and mobile devices for quite some time, but with only limited success. A major step forward was achieved, in 2015, when the “enhancement for TV service” (EnTV) study item1 provided a trigger for European broadcasters to get engaged in 3GPP.

Under the lead of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), broadcasters submitted their initial requirements for EnTV (see Figure 1), including the obligation of public service broadcasters to offer linear TV and radio programmes free-to-air. These requirements called for modifications of 3GPP components, including the radio access, the system architecture and the service layer & core network.

3GPP TR 22.816, published in the summer of 2017 in Release 14, took on board all of these early broadcast requirements - providing promising solutions2 based on LTE. Since then many field trials have been carried out - or have recently been started - which are testing that support for the delivery of broadcast services3 . Their findings together with the results of a gap analysis carried out on Release 14 are currently being fed back into 3GPP to optimize the system and close existing gaps. This will help to support the current Release 16 study on LTE-based 5G terrestrial broadcast4 which is based on the requirements defined in section 9.1 of TR 38.913 for NR.

Maritime Communication Services over 5G systems

Looking at the modernization of the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) in the context of 3GPP specification work.

December 19, 2018

By Hyounhee Koo (SyncTechno), 3GPP MARCOM rapporteur

The first 3GPP Technical Specification covering service requirements (Stage 1) for the support of maritime communication (MARCOM) over 3GPP systems (TS 22.119) was approved last week at the TSG SA Plenary meeting in Sorrento.

The maritime sector, particularly the International Maritime Organization (IMO), have been working on Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) modernization for maritime safety – for terrestrial and satellite systems – to close the ‘information gap’ at sea. In this endeavor, the government of the Republic of Korea and Korean Register (http://www.krs.co.kr) have led the way by advocating 3GPP standard-based networks, such as LTE and 5G, for maritime usage.

The work of 3GPP on bringing together 5G use cases for a variety of vertical domains is creating a unified communication platform that is now a prime candidate to provide a new wave of GMDSS modernization and for broader 5G maritime services.

However, there is work to do. Whereas 3GPP systems exist on land, providing a mature terrestrial radio environment, this is not the case for maritime. The first step that the 3GPP groups and the maritime sector have to achieve is to bring maritime communication into the scope of 3GPP standardization.

A step forward has been achieved with the approval of Stage 1 of the Maritime Communication Services over 3GPP System specification - TS 22.119.

RAN adjusts schedule for 2nd wave of 5G specifications

December 14, 2018

by Balazs Bertenyi, Chairman 3GPP TSG RAN

At the TSG RAN plenary, held in Sorrento, December 10 – 13, the group made some decisions with respect to the delivery schedule – or in 3GPP language ‘freeze schedule’ for the 2nd wave of 5G specifications. The figure below depicts the adjusted overall schedule.